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Tips for Facilitating Maker Activities

As every educator knows, the success of an activity often relies upon the success of the facilitation. Whether in a formal or informal learning, the facilitator must be thoughtful about nurturing maker mindsets and strategies for supporting our learners during difficult experiences with failure and problems that arise throughout the creative design process.

We love using certain picture books to set the stage for makers of all ages, including some of these titles below. These books can help to break the ice by acknowledging that we support a collaborative, failure positive environment where we want everyone to have fun while they are learning and making.

More formally, we turn to Exploratorium Tinkering Studio’s research on best practices for facilitation in maker environments. Their Learning Dimensions Framework highlights ways the facilitator can observe indicators for engagement, initiative and intentionality, social scaffolding, and development of understanding. This really helps novice and expert facilitators maintain awareness of verbal and non-verbal forms of learning during hands-on experiences. Additionally, their Facilitation Field Guide is a great tool for strategies to spark, sustain, and deepen learning throughout the sometimes chaotic and messy making process.

Encourage Constant Reflection

In addition to the above mentioned strategies, we like to leverage formative assessments as much as we possibly can. Reflective prompts are very useful for recurring experiences, including Dr. Smith’s research on student-created reflective video as a means of exploring process and product. For briefer experiences we like to use reflective exit tickets based on K-W-L strategies. Our 3-2-1 exit ticket is helpful for identifying what the learners understood from the experience, what they are curious about, and what they want to learn more about. These help us with our own reflective practice changes to our workshop programs as well as give us a starting point to follow up with participants interests. Our typical 3-2-1 exit ticket is as follows:

Encourage Sharing & Communication With Others Upon Completion

Design is iterative, which requires time to reflect and revise as well as time to discuss these reflections and revisions with others. Ultimately, we want our learners to be able to communicate their design process and project/artifact to others. Discussion is great, but learning can be enhanced if we ask students to complete a reflective report for each design project/artifact in order to formally share their learning. Reflective reports can also benefit as artist statements for display in library or school event/class. Here is an example of a reflective maker report that we use as a culminating activity with our makers.

NOTE: There are also many facilitation strategies and resources available on the Maker Ed website.